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Up for sale a RARE! "Biochemist" William Jencks Hand Signed 2.5X2.5 B&W Photo.
ES-7075E
William
Platt Jencks (August 15, 1927
– January 3, 2007) was an American biochemist. He was noted particularly for his work on enzymes, using concepts drawn from organic chemistry to understand their mechanisms. Jencks
graduated from Harvard College in
1947 with a degree in English, and earned a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard University in
1951. He interned at the Peter Bent Brigham
hospital. Jencks conducted his first postdoctoral research for
two years with Fritz Lipmann at Harvard Medical School.[3] Jencks was drafted into the Army Medical Corps
and was assigned to the Army Medical Service Graduate School at Walter Reed
Medical Center in Washington, DC. He worked with E. L. Durrum and served as the
chair of the department of pharmacology. In 1956–1957, he did a second Public Health Service postdoc with R. B. Woodward of the Harvard University Department
of Chemistry. In 1957, he moved to the new graduate program in biochemistry
at Brandeis University. He
became professor emeritus in 1996. Much of his career focused on reaction
mechanisms used by enzyme catalysts. He was particularly well known for studies of the
reaction of nucleophiles with carbon. He proposed that enzymes use ground state
destabilization, termed the Circe Effect, to increase the reactivity of their bound
substrates. Many of these research interests were explored in his
influential text Catalysis in Chemistry and
Enzymology. Jencks published close to 400 scientific papers during his
career.
Jencks was a co-founder of the biannual Winter Enzyme Mechanisms
Conference. He was memorialized at the 20th Enzyme Mechanisms Meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida,
several days after his death.